by Jack Kerouac
Ginsberg’s handwriting can be particularly difficult to decipher, and some of Kerouac’s both-sided letters have extreme show-through, making it hard to read every word, even with the aid of a magnifying glass. Therefore, in instances where the editors were making a well-calculated guess regarding a particular word, the word is included in brackets, [thus]. Similarly, where a word or passage is completely illegible it is indicated by [?].
Footnotes have been added in order to help identify people and events that might not be widely familiar, but the editors have tried to keep footnotes to a minimum, and we refer readers to their own reference sources. The life stories of Kerouac and Ginsberg have been well told in biographies. In this volume, the Editors’ Notes, which appear throughout the text, are meant as stepping stones to bridge the reader across gaps in chronology, or to fill in missing context for a letter. The storytelling is in the letters, and we leave it to the reader to discover it.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The editors, Bill Morgan for the Ginsberg Estate and David Stanford for the Kerouac Estate, wish to thank the following:
The Allen Ginsberg Trust; trustees Bob Rosenthal and Andrew Wylie, and a special note of thanks to Peter Hale, who really is the workhorse of the Ginsberg world. Steven Taylor kindly made suggestions to the final manuscript. Judy Matz as always was the unsung hero of the editing process.
The Wylie Agency: in particular Allen Ginsberg’s agent, Jeff Posternak.
The Estate of Jack Kerouac; John Sampas, executor, with a special note of appreciation for John’s many years steadfastly guiding the continued unfolding of Kerouac’s work, and ensuring the preservation of his writing for future generations.
Sterling Lord Literistic; in particular Kerouac’s longtime agent Sterling Lord, with whom it is always an elegant pleasure to work—and of whom Kerouac said, “The Lord is my agent, I shall not want.”
Penguin USA, specifically Viking-Penguin, and even more specifically our editor Paul Slovak, with deep gratitude for his longtime furthering of Kerouac’s canon at the house formerly known as The Viking Press, where he and David Stanford burned the midnight oil together for many years in happy hardworking camaraderie. Also big thanks to veteran wordherder Beena Kamlani, whose painstaking labors on other books by Kerouac and Ginsberg made her the ideal colleague for this project.
The following libraries: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin; Butler Library, Department of Special Collections, Columbia University; and Green Library, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University.
We would like to honor the memory of editor, writer, and poet Jason Shinder, who worked on this project in its earliest stages. When interest in bringing it to fruition was revived, he signed on to coedit on behalf of the Ginsberg Estate. His untimely death deprived him of that opportunity. In drawing on notes from the cowritten book proposal, we have undoubtedly incorporated some of his thoughts into the editors’ introduction. We acknowledge his contribution, and, as fellow editors, we salute him.
David Stanford offers ever-thanks to the divine Therese Devine Stanford, his beloved delightful wife, ally, sweetheart, and friend.
1944
Editors’ Note: The earliest letter between Ginsberg and Kerouac was written six or seven months after the two met. During those months, they had become close friends and saw each other almost daily on or near the Columbia College campus on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Then on August 14, 1944, they were involved in a tragic murder, when their mutual friend Lucien Carr killed David Kammerer, an older man who had been infatuated with him for years. Kerouac helped Carr dispose of evidence, and when Carr turned himself in to the police a day or so later, Kerouac was arrested and held as a material witness. Not able to post bail, he was remanded to the Bronx County jail.
Allen Ginsberg [New York, New York] to
Jack Kerouac [Bronx County Jail, New York]
ca. mid-August 1944
Cher Jacques: on the subway:
I’ve been escorting la belle dame sans mercip [Edie Parker1] around all morning—first to Louise’s,2 now to jail. I haven’t a permit, so I won’t visit you.
I saw her carry Dead Souls to you yesterday—I didn’t know you were reading it (she said you’d started it). We (Celine [Young3] et moi), took it out of the college library for Lucien [Carr], too. Anyway, and to get to the point: Good! That book is my family Bible (aside from the Arabian Nights)—it has all the melancholy grandeur of modder Rovshia [Mother Russia], all the borscht and caviar that bubbles in the veins of the Slav, all the ethereal emptiness of that priceless possession, the Russian soul. I have a good critical book on it home—I’ll send it to you (or, I hope, give it to you) when you’re finished with the book. The devil in Gogol is the Daemon Mediocrity, I’m sure you’ll therefore appreciate it. Anyway, I’ll finish some other time.
Edie and I looked into D. Klavier [David Kammerer]’s old room—all the penciled inscriptions on the wall had been painted over by some philistine house-painter. The little graphite mark above the pillow is no more—it once bore emblem (where plaster had fallen off the wall) “Lu—Dave!” The snows of yesteryear seem to have been covered by equally white paint.
To get off this morbid recherché tempest fortunatement perdu, I’m reading Jane Austen and finishing Dickens’s Great Expectations. I also started Brontë’s Wuthering Heights for the second time for an English course; and of course I am also plowing thru about 4 history books at a time (when Edie isn’t chewing my ear) mostly about revolution in Europe in the 19th century. When I am finished I will start one here.
Give my fondest love to Grumet [Jacob Grumet, the assistant district attorney]—A pet de eu fease.
Allen
Editors’ Note: On August 25, 1944, Jack Kerouac and Edie Parker were married while Jack was still in police custody. Edie was then able to borrow money from her trust fund to post Jack’s bail. This letter appears to have been written just as the newlyweds were about to leave New York to live with Edie’s mother in Grosse Pointe, Michigan.
Jack Kerouac [New York, New York] to
Allen Ginsberg [New York, New York]
ca. September 1944
Dear Allen:
Let you not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments—love is not love which alters when it altercation finds—O no! ’tis an ever fix’d lark . . .
Our wedding anniversary fell on the day of the liberation of Paris. I suppose this news Lucien now views morosely—he who wanted to be in Paris among the first. That event will have to wait now . . . but surely it will come about.4 I’d like to go to Paris after the war with Edie, Lucien, and Celine—and a little money for a decent flat somewhere in Montparnasse. Perhaps if I work hard now, and establish my fortune swiftly, I can realize that transcendent ambition. You yourself might lay down your legal labours5 for awhile and join us there. The new vision6 would blossom . . .
But this is all speculation, mediation, nay, emasculation . . . Thanks for the letter. It moved me at times. I find in you a kindred absorption with identity, dramatic meaning, classic unity, and immortality: you pace a stage, yet sit in the boxes and watch. You seek identity in the midst of indistinguishable chaos, in sprawling nameless reality. Like myself, you deserve the Adlerian verdict, but we don’t care about that: Adler7 can name our egocentricities, but only because he himself is an egocentric . . . (the dirty bastard.)
This mania stems from the great Germans, Goethe and Beethoven. He who seeks all knowledge, and then all life and all power—and he who identifies himself with thunder. He is egocentric. But how paltry is the definition.
Lucien is different, or at least, his egocentricity is different, he hates himself intensely, whereas we do not. Hating himself as he does, hating his “humankindness,” he seeks new vision, a post-human post-intelligence. He wishes more than Nietzsche proscribed. He wants more than the next mutation—he wants a post-soul. Lord only knows what he wants!
I prefer the new vision in te
rms of art—I believe, I smugly cling to the belief that art is the potential ultimate out of the humankind materials of art, I tell myself, the new vision springs. Look at Finnegans Wake and Ulysses and The Magic Mountain. Lord only knows the truth! Lord only can tell!
Well, goodbye . . . and write: tell me more about the shadow and the circle.
Ton ami,
Jean
1945
Editors’ Note: After spending only a month in Michigan, Kerouac returned to New York City and renewed his friendships with Ginsberg and William Burroughs. Once again they were in daily contact, so there was little need to write, and when they did correspond it was only to arrange meetings here and there around the city. During the summer of 1945, Kerouac went off to find work and Ginsberg signed up for training at the Maritime Service Training Station in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.
Allen Ginsberg [n.p., Paterson, New Jersey?] to
Jack Kerouac [Ozone Park, New York]
ca. late July 1945
Cher Breton:
I am sorry that we could not rescue a final meeting from our departure. The good Dr. Luria [a doctor with the Merchant Marine] told me you’d called, and I sent another postcard in haste. I’m writing a last time in the hope of reaching you before your voyage. A moi—Tomorrow morning, all the preliminaries having been dispensed with, I shall sign into the Merchant Marine. Incipit vita nuova! Monday I shall leave for Sheepshead Bay, where I hope to tutor myself anew in all these strange realities I have learned from the purgatorial season.
Your letter came to me after I returned from a fruitless journey into New York to recapture the grandeur of another time, and it came, almost, as a letter from the past, and conjured up in me all the emotions I had been seeking the days before.
But, Jack, rest assured that I shall return to Columbia. Bill [Burroughs] never advised me to stray from the fount of higher learning! I should return, however, to finish college, even if it were only a pilgrimage of acceptance of former time.
I hear from Celine [Young] from time to time; I saw her two weeks ago. I’ll probably see her before I leave. Hal [Chase] has returned to Denver for the summer (a week ago.) Nothing from Joan [Adams] or John [Kingsland]. I still see [Lionel] Trilling8 from time to time, he’s invited me to his house (yes, I received the invitation, I acknowledge, with my usual pleasure at such things.) I hope I hear from you from Paris; at any rate, please write when you get back to the U.S., before you leave for California.
I understand, and I was moved that you were openly conscious that we were not the same comme amis. I have known it, and respected this change, in a way. But perhaps I should explain, for I have felt myself mostly responsible for it. We are of different kinds, as you have said, and I acknowledge it more fully now than before, because at one time I was fearful of this difference, perhaps ashamed of it. Jean, you are an American more completely than I, more fully a child of nature and all that is of the grace of the earth. You know, (I will digress) that is what I most admired in him, our savage animal Lucien. He was the inheritor of nature; he was gifted by the earth with all the goodness of her form, physical and spiritual. His soul and body were consonant with each other, and mirrored each other. In much the same way, you are his brother. To categorize according to your own terms, though intermixed, you are romantic visionaries. Introspective yes, and eclectic, yes. I am neither romantic nor a visionary, and that is my weakness and perhaps my power; at any rate it is one difference. In less romantic and visionary terms, I am a Jew, (with powers of introspection and eclecticism attendant, perhaps.) But I am alien to your natural grace, to the spirit which you would know as a participator in America. Lucien and yourself are much like Tadyis [the young, handsome boy in Death in Venice]; I am not so romantic or inaccurate as to call myself Aschenbach [the old professor who is infatuated with Tadyis], though isolate; I am not a cosmic exile such as [Thomas] Wolfe (or yourself) for I am an exile from myself as well. I respond to my home, my society as you do, with ennui and enervation. You cry “oh to be in some far city and feel the smothering pain of the unrecognized ego!” (Do you remember? We were self ultimate once.) But I do not wish to escape to myself, I wish to escape from myself. I wish to obliterate my consciousness and my knowledge of independent existence, my guilts, my secretiveness, what you would (perhaps unkindly) call my “hypocrisy.” I am no child of nature, I am ugly and imperfect to myself, and I cannot through poetry or romantic visions exalt myself to symbolic glory. Lest you misunderstand me, I do not, or do not yet, own this difference to be an inferiority. I have sensed that you doubted my—artistic strength—shall we call it? Jean I have sincerely long ceased to doubt my power as a creator or initiator in art. Of this I am sure. But even if I would, I cannot as you look on it as ultimate radiance, or saving glory, redeeming genius. Art has been for me, when I did not deceive myself, a meager compensation for what I desire. I am bored with these frantic cravings, tired of them and therefore myself, and contemptuous, though tolerant, of all my vast powers of self-pity and self-expressive misery. What am I? What do I seek? Self-aggrandizement, as you describe it, is a superficial description of what my motives are, and my purposes. If I overreach myself for love, it is because I crave it so much, and have known so little of it. Love as perhaps an opiate; but I know it to be creative as well. More as a self-aggrandizement that transcends the self-effacement that I unconsciously strive for, and negates the power of self-aggrandizement. I don’t know if you can understand this. I renounce the pain of the “frustrated ego,” I renounce poetic passive hysteria; I have known them too long, and am worn and enervated from seeking them too successfully. I am sick of this damned life!
Well, these last years have been the nearest to fulfillment of my desires, and truthful feeling I thank you for the gift. You were right, I suppose, in keeping your distance. I was too intent on self-fulfillment, and rather crude about it, with all my harlequinade and conscious manipulation of your pity. I overtaxed my own patience and strength even more than I did yours, possibly. You behaved like a gentlemen; though I think that you did take me too seriously, assign too much symbolic value to my motion and friction. There is much that was not merely ironic, but also purposeless and foolish in myself and my activity. I can’t forget Burroughs’ tolerant smiles as I mockingly and seriously explained to him all the devious ways of my intelligence. Still, Jack, I was conscious of all that I did, and inwardly sincere at all times, and this I have always been. I wonder if you comprehend the meanings which I can’t explain. Well, though in poetry I shall lie whitely and elevate these frustrations to “wounds,” I shall have flashes of insight and know better. At any rate, if you are able to understand me, I ask your tolerance; if not, I plead for your forgiveness. When we meet again I promise you that seven months will have elapsed profitably, that we will meet again as brothers in comedy, a tragedy, what you will, but brothers.
What is ahead I do not know; a valediction is our heritage; the season dies for a time, and until it is resurrected we must die as well. To all who perish, all who lose, farewell; to the stranger, to the traveler, to the exile, I bid farewell; to the penitents and judges of the trial, farewell; to the pensive and thunderous youth, farewell; to the gentle children and the sons of wrath, to those with flowers in their eyes, of sorrow or of sickness, a tender adieu.
Allen
Jack Kerouac [Ozone Park, New York] to
Allen Ginsberg [Maritime Service Training Station,
Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, New York]
August 10, 1945
Hello Allen:
It didn’t develop so well at camp,9 work and pay not being what I was led to believe, so I’m home again now. You make first with the letters.
I’m going to soda-jerk occasionally, enough to pay the fare to L.A. Also am writing a batch of potable magazine love stories, hope I can sell one of them.
(They wanted me to clean latrines at $30 a week at camp. Pfui.)
Let me know how you like or dislike Sheepshead.
Comme toujours
Jean
Allen Ginsberg [Sheepshead Bay, New York] to
Jack Kerouac [n.p., Ozone Park, New York?]
August 12, 1945
August 12.
Cher Jean:
“L’Automne deja.” . . . Il ya une annee jadis, si je me souviens bin, que le monde a venu a’sou fin. Today is Sunday; this evening, or on the 14th, we violent and pensive children will be reenacting our crimes and judging ourselves.10 The year somehow has passed quickly, almost has eclipsed itself. At moments when les remords sont crystalisees by some Proustian gesture, I think of the season of hell with a willing sentimental yearning. Today while I was trying to sleep I heard a negro singing softly, “you always hurt the one you love,” and I began singing it myself in homage. You must change your life!
The abrupt fluctuation of your personal fortunes vis-à-vis stable employment have ceased to surprise me, though they still are “kind of amusing.” I can’t criticize your leaving the camp, but what I miscalled “Emotional Smugness”—a sense of something missing in your head besides bourgeois idealism, was responsible for your getting yourself into such [bettises?]. Don’t you even know what you’re signing up for? You have what my grandmother calls a Goyeshe Kopfe—a Goy’s head—as differentiated from a Yiddishe Kopfe—a shrewd Yiddish foresight somewhat a la Burroughs. I haven’t heard from him.